Architecture Description Language Driven Design Space Exploration in the Presence of Coprocessors

| Embedded systems present a tremendous opportunity to customize designs by exploiting the application behavior. Shrinking time-tomarket, coupled with short product lifetimes create a critical need for rapid exploration and evaluation of candidate System-on-Chip(SOC) architectures. Recent work on language driven Design Space Exploration (DSE) uses Architecture Description Languages (ADL) to capture the processor-memory architecture and automatically generate a software toolkit from the ADL description. We propose in this paper an ADL-based approach to explicitly capture the coprocessor con guration, and perform exploration of the coprocessor architecture along with processor and memory subsystem. We present a set of experiments using the TI C6x architecture to demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.